Prescription painkillers are a leading cause of the American heroin epidemic, and a key issue in the New Hampshire primaries.
President Obama now proposed $1.1 billion for urgent action to fight the epidemic. As part of this, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently announced several measures to deal with drug abuse, including increasing studies on drugs after they come to market. One researcher who’s all too aware of where the problem might begin—and end—is Joseph Palamar.
When Joseph Palamar’s younger sister died from heroin addiction he was determined to help others at risk. Five years on, his latest study on high school seniors offers context. He shows opioids and heroin use go hand in hand, and teens may transition to heroin because it’s cheaper than opioid pills, including Vicodin or OxyContin, and more available.
We ask Palamar, public health expert at NYU Langone Medical Center, New York, to tell us more about his study.
ResearchGate: What did you find in your study about the use of prescription painkillers and heroin amongst high school seniors?
Joseph Palamar: We found that over three-quarters of teens who reported heroin use had also used opioid pills in a nonmedical manner. We also found that the more frequent the use of opioids, the higher the risk of reporting use of heroin. We couldn’t deduce whether opioid use came before heroin as the data were cross-sectional, but we believe our findings add to the theory that addiction to opioids increases the risk of users moving onto heroin.
RG: How do parents’ and students’ income and education play into your results?
JP: Compared to low parental education, moderate parental education was actually a risk factor for nonmedical use of opioids. This may suggest that those in the middle class or of higher socioeconomic status are now at increased risk. Likewise, we found that higher student income was a robust risk factor for nonmedical opioid use.
In fact, higher income was strongly associated with high-frequency nonmedical opioid use and this makes sense because a nonmedical opioid habit is an expensive one—a much more expensive habit than heroin as unfortunately heroin is cheaper and more available.
